codetreasury.com

Menu ☰

Setting up WordPress on Amazon Lightsail

After an unsuccessful attempt to start blogging, I decided to give it another try. And while my site with my 4 blog entries was still up and running, I decided to find it a new home. I have been working with AWS for awhile now and thought that Amazon Lightsail would be the perfect location.

Getting up and running was simple. Figuring out the details took a bit more effort. I decided to compile what I learned into a single easily accessible page.

Setting up Amazon Lightsail Account

For $5 (as of this writing) you will get a basic instance with 512 MB of RAM, 1 vCPU and 20 GB SSD. Head over to https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/ and get yourself an account. You will need a credit or a debit card to sign up but you can try it out risk free for 30 days. Once you have your account, head over to Lightsail home and create an instance. Choose your instance location, platform (Linux) and a bluepring (WordPress).

Next, choose your instance plan, hit create and 10 minutes later you will have a ready host.

After a few minutes in a pending state, you will see the following:

Enter your new IP address into your browser and you will see a default WordPress site.

Connecting to your instance

The easiest way to connect to your newly created instance is to use Amazon’s build in terminal. Just click the terminal icon and you’re in. (You can also set up your private/public keys to connect to the instance through your computer’s terminal.)

Obtaining your WordPress admin password:

At the prompt, type the following:

1

catbitnami_application_password

Your password will be revealed. Now you can login and customize your blog.

Removing Bitnami logo (Optional)

If you do not want to have Bitnami branding at the bottom of the page, you can remove it by following the easy steps below.

1

2

sudo/opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/bnconfig--disable_banner1

sudo/opt/bitnami/ctlscript.shrestart apache

Setting up static IP address

For convenience and stability, you may want to setup a static IP address to your instance. Amazon will not charge you for having a static IP address that is being used, i.e. attached to your instance. However, you will be charged half a cent per hour for having a static IP address just sit around.

Go over to Networking tab and click Create Static IP button

Select the instance and give that IP address a meaningful name

Hit Create and you’re all done.

The only thing left to do is set up your DNS to use your newly minted static IP address.